uDG 2011 Entry: Z-1

Vast is space… complete is the destruction… in my womb you rejuvenate… fragmented visions of past horrors, endless suffering and the chaos of humanity's great retreat stirs your soul. Reborn for my love. Reborn for my vainness. Reborn for my vengeance. Too soon we must shift to real space to anew our witness of this dread Krek plague. Cruel are their unrelenting swarms. Shorn with mercy. Yet as I enumerate their patterns I am consumed by the revelation of their miscalculation. The way is clear. Rebirth is near. All shall fear.

Doug is/has working on proof of concept, then going on to the engine and hopefully I can poke him towards creating a level editor based on my mockup (http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1...9&type=1). I'll be pushing pixels, doing audio and creating the story. I hope to bring in a Japanese painter to do our stills, character images and non-engine graphics. Fundamentally it is a shoot'em-up in space. Since we are 'old boys' from the 8-bit era, it will be rooted in that decade where both of us lost much coin to a certain game starting with G. Anyways, I've always hated the typical, 'Lets shoot the aliens just because...' Sure, its a shooter.. but I've always been interested in why shoot them? What did they do to you? etc etc... I'm fleshing out the 'characters' which I hope can find their way into the game... maybe not the released uDG11 game, but some future version. It's a good way to kill time as Doug does all the 'hard work.'

Ah, I just read your post MattDiamond. Nice. Yes, that is our fallback plan... if the shooter doesn't work out, we'll spin it into a game about developers killing themselves. It will be like lemmings. I will take great joy and seeing all past friendemies from here go off cliffs without little parachutes.

EvolOne, yeah feels nice but I haven't gotten 100% back in.. I think I won't until I can make my office in my basement... Then, watch out... now if I could only get Doug to connect his internet so we can continue this baby...

My wife's friend Noriko is doing 2D art based on lots of selected faces, clothing and so on I selected for her. She is crazy good... Uses Corel Painter and touch pad for everything. Down the road, I want to talk her into doing a graphic novel to go along with this game.

I just got a quick demo of a song from my old buddy back in Japan. So hopefully we can get going with music... lucky for me, I have gigs of SFX.. lol

Writing a story/creating a universe has sucked most of my time... Maybe it isn't ideal for this contest considering the time constraints? I thought the hardest part graphic wise would be to have the main ship something I liked. That is nearly out of the way... I'm pondering to start banging out the sprites of this ship and moving on to the 100s of other sprites or spending a tad more time in the texture department. My mind says, 'It will become a 64x64 sprite in the end... move on..' But my artist soul says... 'Get it right!' LOL

Outside of the game asset realm I have been looking at many frameworks and tools that are 'in' right now and many that are not so in vogue but appealing. Much has changed since I actually had to code... does anyone use Pascal on VMS anymore? lol Maybe my desktop Mac is faster than my old colleges' VMS system